“[South America] has been underrepresented in typological surveys and in the typological literature generally, and knowledge of the different kinds of typological features and their distribution in the world is significantly limited by this absence.” — Campbell Lyle & Grondona Verónica (Eds.). 2012. The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide,vol. 2. p.259 (via ergativity)

So, we've talked before on this blog about linguistic terminology. It's well-known that linguistics has a lot of terms, many of them used differently in different contexts or restarted un unexpected ways. Right now I'd like you suggestions for linguistic terminology that stands out.
I'd like to know terminology that you find to be restricted in an unusual way to a certain group of linguists or language familyunusually polysemicrestricted in time in som way (archaic or very new for example)
If you have any suggestions, feel free to submit them here! All you need to do is follow that link and edit the spreadsheet (anyone can edit, you don't even need a Google-ID), or leave a comment here on this blog post or tell us here. Don't worry about really clever or super new suggestions, all suggestions are good suggestions just lay them on me :)! I also recommend readingthis text I wrote here about linguistic terminology and the dangers of standardisation/eurocentricism.
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If you are making maps, you need this new thing I've just been introduced to: Color brewer! Hurray!
It's a simply site that helps you select colors for your maps that are maximally contrastive and informative, but also safe for color blind people, printing etc. It might not solve problems with projectors (you know what I'm talking about), not sure about that yet.

Humans like to form groups, and linguists, and academics in general, are human too (despite popular beliefs that we're all lizards and/or AI). Within these groups there are certain shared conventions and expected shared knowledge and assumptions. Groups are established both by shared conventions, culture etc, but they are also a product of the exclusion (intentional or not, explicit or implicit) of others.

The rules that govern whether or not a statement is a viable member of a language is called grammar, it can vary with each group you are a part of and even over time and specific context within that group.

Sometimes the term "grammar" is used more broadly also outside of the study of language and is also applied to any set of rules that govern whether something is a member of a system or not, such as the grammar of Chinese ice-ray latices (see Stouffs & Wieringa 2006). FYI, this is a an ice-ray latice (image taken from here) --->

Happy typologizing!
And always remember: read their definitions carefully before questioning the coding of a feature in a specific language, if problem still remains or definition is non-existent: then email the editors.

This new tool let's you investigate the WALS data and correlations between typological features and geographical areas and/or genealogical groupings in an easy way. It's very user-friendly, just go there and click around and you'll understand. You can manipulate the map and the "wheel" (the "sunburst") by clicking on segments.

It's based on the classical genealogical classification of WALS (i.e. not identical to Ethnologue or Glottolog, mind you) and more or less classical divisions of the world into countries and macro areas (Africa, South America, North America, Oceania, Eurasia and South East Asia). You can also define your own areas by selecting an area on the map.

The center of the wheel when you start is "all", the first level outside is macro areas, the second is top-level…

A new update of PHOIBLE (Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon) is up!!
It now features 1, 627 languages! And it's freely available online with a user-friendly interface!
A phonetic inventory is a description of the speech sounds in a language that are meaningful, i.e. if one changes on into the other it makes a change in meaning. [l] (<low>) and [ɻ] (<row>) are for example both phonemes of English, but not in Korean or Mandarin.
We're gonna tell you lots more about it under the tag FreeOnlineLinguisticsDatabases,
but for now just enjoy that there's a new version up with lots more languages and other handy changes to the site! Hurrah!

Endangered languages publishing (EL publishing for short) was just recently founded by Peter Austin, David Nathan and Julia Sallabank​​. Their website has already had over 1900 visitors and among other things contains the latest volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD 12 -- a special issue on documentation and archiving), an app dealing with Khoi-san languages, and the complete back catalog of LDD volumes 1 to 11.​

I'm day dreaming about there existing a journal/book series of academic publications that encouraged improvements and innovation in methodology and data collection by letting reviewers review everything but the results when approving articles. This has actually already been done once (thanks Lilla for the tip): These proposals will be reviewed for their importance and soundness. Once provisionally accepted, if authors complete the study as proposed, the results will be published without regard to the outcome.

Academic scholars publish their results as articles in journals, as chapters in edited volumes, as monographs, as conference oral presentations and sometimes also as in conference proceedings etc. Practically all of the time the work get reviewed before hand by anonymous reviewers, often working for free, and they approve or reject - most often with the condition that certain revisions are made.

Many academic publications have the structure of: introduction background hypothes…

Sorry we've haven't been posting for a while. Apologies offered, sent of into the blackness that is broadcasting into the internets - with hopes of acceptance and forgiveness.
Also, hello to new followers on twitter, tumblr, blog and the book of faces!! If you would like to ask us something, comment or just share whatever, don't hesitate to contact us.
This time I've got at goodie from grammar reading for ya! It's an excerpt from a corpus of Samoan, a language spoken on the pacific islands of Samoa. The excerpt is from this PhD dissertation: Mayer, John. F. (2001) Code-switching in Samoan: T-style and K-style. University of Hawai'i.
This is only the beginning, in this text the different actors play different body parts and they all complain at a government of the body meeting about 'stomach' (he smells, he makes noises, because of him the gums have to chew and she doesn't like that etc etc). Many motion for the removal of the stomach, but they late…

Humans Who Read Grammars

This is a blog by young linguists interested in diversity and description of the world's languages. We write posts about research and academia relevant to young linguists and sometimes also the general public.